John Smelcer is the award-winning author of over 40 books, as many as James Michener or James Patterson, more than Anne Rice, and a few less than Stephen King, published in an eclectic range of interests. Aside from John's many novels and poetry collections, he has published books in history, mythology, anthropology, archaeology, linguistics, as well as anthologies, plays, screenplays, and children’s picture books. His short stories, poems, interviews, and essays -- read by millions -- appear in over 400 magazines and journals worldwide.

Smelcer's writing appears in dozens of anthologies of the nation’s foremost Native American writers. His autobiography appears in Here First: Autobiographical Essays by Native American Writers (Modern Library/Random House, 2000). In 1995, he edited the anthology, Durable Breath: Contemporary Native American Poetry, which was taught at hundreds of colleges and universities across the nation. The anthology included poems by Sherman Alexie, Joy Harjo, James Welch, Diane Glancy, Joseph Bruchac, Simon Ortiz, Linda Hogan, Louise Erdrich, and Jim Barnes. His novel, The Trap, published in the United States and the United Kingdom, has been hailed an "epic" and a "masterpiece." It won the $10,000 James Jones Prize, was named a Notable Book by the New York Public Library, was an American Library Association BBYA Top Ten Pick and a VOYA Top Shelf Selection." Winston Groom (Forrest Gump) wrote, "The Trap is a lovely book, beautifully written." Ray Bradbury called it "Unforgettable!"

Nobelist Elie Wiesel called John's follow-up novel, The Great Death, "Stunning!" Tony Hillerman called it "a small miracle." His novel, Edge of Nowhere, is forthcoming in the United Kingdom. Frank McCourt said it has "more psychological depth than Robinson Crusoe." Smelcer's Alaska Native myths appear in The Last New Land (Alaska Northwest Books, 1996), a collection of the greatest Alaskan literature of all time. John’s stories are included in the volume alongside Jack London, Robert Service, Louis L’Amour, and James Michener (who, along with John Gardner and Joseph Campbell, personally encouraged John to become a writer). His book on Alaska Native mythology, The Raven and The Totem, now in its 15th printing and with over 50,000 copies in print, features a foreword by Joseph Campbell, who helped George Lucas create the archetypal stories and characters in Star Wars. Before writing a single word of any of his novels, John brainstorms the concepts with his friend, Dave Collins. Somewhat of a reclusive hermit, Dave has lived in a tent in the woods of Alaska for fifteen years. It is an important friendship to John.

John Smelcer is one of the last speakers on earth of the Ahtna Athabaskan language, an endangered Alaska Native language. Only 20 or so elders, all 30-50 years older than John, still speak the language. He is the only living tribal member who can read and write in Ahtna, having learned it from every living elder who spoke Ahtna since the 1980s. When John Smelcer dies, so too will the Ahtna language. John is also one of only a handful of Native speakers of Alutiiq, a neighboring yet unrelated Alaska Native language from the Prince William Sound region. It too is extremely endangered. As with his work with Ahtna, John studied Alutiiq with every living elder who spoke the language over a four year period. John Smelcer is the author-editor of dictionaries of both languages, the author of numerous articles and encyclopedia entries, and a scholarly book chapter on "The Origins of Native American Languages," making him one of the world's foremost scholars of Alaska Native/Native American languages. John regularly publishes in the Ahtna language. Ahtna tribal members from across the nation regularly thank John for making the Ahtna dictionary freely available to them. Since the mid 1990s, John has received nearly a million dollars in state, federal, and private grants to support his research in the preservation of Alaska Native languages and cultures.

Many of America’s greatest writers and scholars collaborate with John Smelcer, including John Updike with The Binghamton Poems , Nobelist Saul Bellow and Ursula K. LeGuin with Stealing Indians, Noam Chomsky with The Complete Ahtna Poems and The Ahtna Noun Dictionary, Carl Sagan with Tracks, Gary Snyder with In the Shadows of Mountains, Denise Levertov and Allen Ginsberg with Songs from an Outcast, Michael Dorris, James Welch, James Dickey,  and J. D. Salinger with ALASKAN: Stories from the Last Great Land, and Ted Hughes (Sylvia Plath's ex-husband) with Raven Speaks. (Incidentally, John was friends with Nicholas Hughes, the son of Hughes and Sylvia Plath, before his death in Fairbanks, Alaska in March 2009.) With Noam Chomsky, Harvard University Professor Steven Pinker, the leading cognitive psychologist in the world and author of The New York Times best-seller, The Language Instinct generously provided a foreword to The Ahtna Noun Dictionary. It was after meeting Chomsky that Smelcer began working on his Ahtna Dictionary. The Dalai Lama graciously provided a foreword to The Alutiiq Noun Dictionary. During the last years of his life, two-time Pulitzer Prize winner Norman Mailer developed a literary friendship with John, who was faculty in a graduate creative writing program in which Mailer was associated and where his son, Michael Mailer, was also faculty. John edited and published two of Mailer's poems in Rosebud, as well as his acceptance speech for the Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Book Award Foundation. In exchange, Mailer edited one of John's novels. In the fall of 2006, a year before he passed away, John visited his friend in Provincetown. In a bit of irony, John gave a talk about creative writing in Frank McCourt's high school English class in Brooklyn the year before he published Angela's Ashes, which won the Pulitzer Prize! McCourt kindly edited John's novel, Edge of Nowhere months before his death in July 2009. Along with a playwright friend, John used to visit Tom O’Horgan in his loft in Manhattan. Tom was best known for directing the 1970s Broadway hit musicals Hair and Jesus Christ Superstar. In November 2008, John met social activist-historian Howard Zinn at Binghamton University. Over the next year, they collaborated on The History of the United States of American Exceptionalism. His writing has been nominated for dozens of literary awards, and has won many of them, most recently The $10,000 James Jones Prize, a prestigious award for the best first novel in the nation; the Kessler Prize for the best book of poetry published in America by a poet over 40; the James Hearst Prize for Poetry; the Robert Penn Warren Prize for Poetry; and Without Reservation was a finalist for the Western Writers of America Award for poetry in 2004. His books have been contenders for almost every major American literary award, including the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the American Book Award, the PEN/Faulkner Prize, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, and the American Library Association Book Award, as well as dozens of other awards, including numerous nominations for the Pushcart Prize and the Booktrust Award (UK). One of John's poems received an honorable mention for the 2010 Academy of American Poets Prize.

John was a consulting editor to Parabola, the world's foremost magazine for myth, spirituality, and the search for meaning. John's essay on compassion appears alongside an essay by the Dalai Lama. For over a decade, John Smelcer was co-judge of the National Poetry Book Award with poets Allen Ginsberg, James Dickey, John Updike, Denise Levertov, X. J. Kennedy, Donald Justice, Thom Gunn, Stanley Kunitz and David Ignatow. Of the many books John selected as winner, Denise Duhamel's The Woman With Two Vaginas was his favorite. John Smelcer is the co-founder of several major American literary awards, including the William Stafford Prize for Poetry, Dylan Thomas American Poet Prize (with Aeronwy Thomas), The X. J. Kennedy Prize for Nonfiction, The Mary Shelley Prize for Fiction, and the John Gardner Prize for Playwriting. Smelcer also collaborated with three-time Pulitzer Prize winner Edward Albee to (unsuccessfully) establish the Edward Albee Prize for Playwriting. Throughout the many years he has served as poetry editor at Rosebud and as co-judge with William Stafford of the National Poetry Book Award, John estimates that he has received and read a staggering 400,000 poems!

Growing up in Alaska since the 1960s has been very exciting for John. Over the years, he has been attacked by bears and wolves (He has the scars to prove it. In the spring of 2010, a young woman was killed and eaten by a pack of wolves in Alaska.), has climbed many of Alaska's mountains, traversed many of its countless glaciers (he even rescued his brother who once fell into a crevasse), has been marooned on an island without survival gear, has been stalked by a polar bear, has rescued moose calves from raging rivers, and in October 1988, he participated in a rescue to save grey whales, which had been stranded when the shifting polar ice pack trapped them near Pt. Barrow. Much of John's writing is based on these life events.

John has often been the keynote speaker at university commencements. For his life-long work in ethnic studies and ethnic literature, Baruch College of Manhattan, the most ethnically diverse college in America, asked John to deliver the keynote address at their fall 2009 Convocation. John Smelcer is the Clifford D. Clark Fellow of English and creative writing at Binghamton University, the honors campus of State University of New York. In March 2010, John received an Award for Excellence in Research. In August 2010, a Binghamton University senior majoring in social work/human development, received the first John E. and Susan D. Smelcer scholarship, an award to be given annually to a Binghamton University student majoring in social work or English.

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